Sumerlands : "s/t"

Here is an actual metal version of what Ghost first wanted to do, though there is more Judas Priest in the fire they attack the riffs with. Vocal Phil Swanson from Hour of 13 and Atlantean Codex doesn't overly cheese it up with the power metal vocals. The production gives everything a dense grittiness and leaves this album having a classic metal sound. "The Guardian " locks into a fist pumping arena rocking riff. The intensity conveyed is effective due to the song's razor sharp focus. There is some melodic ebb and flow in the dynamics, without losing any of the drive. Despite the first two songs being so perfectly written, they begin to lose steam going into "Timelash".

The riff seems to be plucked out of a hat of generic 80's metal riffs. The vocals follow a vocal line almost to much like the previous song and the chorus fails to punch out from the verse and grab you. Without the guitar killing it, your attention begins to turn to the lyrics which are a bunch of hybrid metal nothing. The gallop picks up on "Blind", but the song is otherwise straight forward.  Things finally change on "Haunted Forever" . The riff backs off , but the vocal follow a rather stiff pattern and the melody takes an approach that doesn't vary from the other songs and makes Swanson come across as a one trick pony."Spiral Infinite" comes hammering at you harder like a pumped up version of "Electric Eye". There are some weird effects in a break down, but nothing really else dynamically to add to the melodic depth.

Finally Swanson lends some different accents to song than the normally rigid patterns he has stuck to for the bulk of the album. The final song is more of a instrumental outro, that brings in some weird sounds that made me wonder if I was still listening to the same album. I'll round this down to a 7.5 , because I was disappointed